Over the past few months the MARS team has been teasing a new FPGA-based system: Multi Arcade & Retro System. The concept is similar to the MiSTer, but running on its own custom, more powerful hardware. They’re expecting to launch it early next year at a $700 price point…
The MARS team was talking about Dreamcast/Naomi/Atomis Wave/CPS 3 type systems to be released for the MARS unit. I am quite excited as some of my favorite games are in the dreamcast level of systems. I have 3 MiSTer systems set up in arcade cabinets and I would love the ability to play more modern systems in there. I also imagine that with enough time the current MiSTer cores will be ported over the the MARS platform. Also the concept front end looks quite nice.
So it’s got a open source software stack and it seems like they want MARS to operate as kind of a spiritual successor to the MiSTer, which all sounds great to me.
I guess the big question is how much of a market will there be for a $700 MiSTer-like console?